Lesson Success: make the most out of your guitar lessons
If you want your guitar lessons to go well, we will need a few things from you. Without good students, there are no good teachers.
Attendance. Come to your lesson on time, and do not miss lessons. It sets a bad precedent. If you do this, you are saying to yourself “guitar is low-priority for me” and even worse, you are telling yourself “I cannot honor my commitments.”
Practice every day. Make a goal, and stick to it. There is no such thing as a person who does not have time to learn the guitar. There are only people who are too preoccupied with other activities in order to make that time. But since you are here, you are not one of those people.
Take notes. Our fastest-learning students are those who organize their practice by setting goals, taking notes, and even keeping a record of their practice.
Get in the rhythm. If your teacher assigns you an exercise, make sure that you spend some time on it during the weak. Just as you cannot walk north and south at the same time, you cannot make progress with your teacher if both your teacher and you are trying to move in different directions. Sometimes this means you need to make a compromise. See below.
Give feedback. Your teacher is here to help you. Even if they are the best guitarist in the world and you want to be just like your teacher. No matter how much you might love (or hate!) your teacher, their job is to help you learn. You can only help your teacher do their job by giving feedback. We need to hear your thoughts in order to help you.
Watch the clock. If you see us looking at the clock, it's not because we're thinking about lunch time. It's because we only have a few minutes with you each week and we want to spend the time wisely. You can help us by trying not to spend too much time talking about your week. We like you, and we do want to hear about how your week was. But try to keep in mind that we also feel of pressure to make sure that each week we help you improve. We want to have a friendly relationship with you too, but just remember that the more of the lesson time you spend talking, the more we feel that we are not properly doing our job.